Apartment residents to be reimbursed for towing charges

Wednesday

Jun 18, 2014 at 12:01 AM

Jeff Brownjeff.brown@doverpost.com@DoPoJeff

The owner of a Pennsylvania sealcoat company said Tuesday that three residents of Dover’s Country Village apartment complex will be reimbursed after their vehicles were improperly towed during a recent parking lot improvement project.

“There were cars parked in an area where we were not supposed to do any work, and our foreman took it upon himself to expand the area because there were only three cars in that area,” said Mark Bevevino, the owner of Malvern-based Macadam Company.

Bevevino promised to pay back $220 to the owners of all three vehicles, after resident Randee Popkin notified the Dover Post that her daughters’ cars had been moved despite having been parked in accordance with instructions posted by the complex managers.

Country Village Apartments is owned by Morgan Properties of King of Prussia, Pa., and is one of three company-owned properties in Dover.

Popkin and fellow County Village residents Diamond Howard and Mike Cook all told the Dover Post that they made sure their vehicles were not left in the identified work areas when a resealing project began on June 2.

Yet all three said their cars were still towed to an impound lot in Bear.

Over the past week, the Dover Post made several inquiries about the towed vehicles, including a request for information from the Macadam Company, which was contracted to sealcoat and restripe the parking lot and roadways within the complex.

Just before the Post’s Monday deadline, Bevevino said he had talked to the foreman for the Country Village project. That person, who he did not name, had made an on-the-spot decision to expand the area the company was supposed to reseal, Bevevino said.

“We did, in fact, make that [work] area bigger than we were supposed to,” he said. “That was our mistake.”

Doing additional work in cases where a project has been divided into different sections is not uncommon, Bevevino said.

A notice posted to residents about the project indicated work would begin on June 2 and additional sections of the parking lot would be completed on June 4 and June 11.

Because repairing pavement and sealcoating work is weather sensitive, two days were set aside in case rain or poor conditions kept crews from working.

Bevevino said he did not have the names of the people whose vehicles were removed. He said he did not know if those vehicles belonged to Popkin, Howard, Cook, or another Country Village resident.

The owner of each towed vehicle was charged $175 in recovery fees and $45 in storage costs by M&D Towing, the company contracted by Morgan Properties to remove the vehicles.

Bevevino said he would be getting in contact with managers at the Country Village leasing office to verify whose cars were erroneously moved.

“I’ve been in business for 28 years, and if we do something wrong, we try to be fair about it,” he said. “If we make a mistake we will rectify it.”